ANZ National Bank (MIS100 2012)

A more strategic approach to project prioritisation for ANZ New Zealand has introduced greater robustness into the technology planning process, improving the ability to refine and define the project agenda and communicate and gain buy-in from the business.

“Technology at ANZ is a core source of competitive advantage enabling ANZ to deliver on its strategy of becoming a super regional bank,” says COO Craig Sims. “Continuing to strengthen and provide a robust technology base remains a priority in New Zealand, as this enables us to support customers wherever they do business and deliver solutions and services that are convenient and customer-focused.

“We need to continue to operate a robust technology prioritisation process to ensure a clear business case and return of investment on all technology initiatives,” says Sims. “Focus continues on delivering cost effective, scalable, re-useable technical solutions.”

Three major programmes of work are being undertaken, each of which demonstrates how IT is achieving business objectives for the bank. Firstly, ANZ’s move to a single core technology system will result in increased agility and responsiveness to its customers.

“Implementing one core system will simplify business and deliver a better service and product for customers,” says Sims. “We intend to make this a seamless change, which over time will help us to be more innovative, faster to introduce new products, and more responsive to customers’ needs. Importantly, the single system will significantly enhance our customers’ online banking experience. We’ve lagged in this area, but we’re back in the game with the changes we’re implementing.”

Secondly, the implementation of the Foundation Infrastructure Programme is expected to improve system stability and reduce technology risk. This programme of work is focused on bringing the bank’s entire technology infrastructure across all platforms up to a supported state, treating all identified high and extreme security vulnerabilities, moving all production services to a new state of the art, highly resilient data centre, and simplifying and improving disaster recovery capabilities.

Lastly, a Payments Enablement Programme, the primary objective of which is to consolidate and align ANZ NZ payments, leading to improvement in efficiency of payments processes and the customer payments proposition. To this end, the bank has worked on development of an international payment services solution to provide high quality, cross-border payments, ensuring that ANZ can service customers in this area, and has recently completed development and implementation of settlement before interchange enabling systems, to meet the regulatory deadline of February 2012 for all New Zealand Banks. “As part of this Payments Enablement work, ANZ New Zealand has taken the lead in reviewing ANZ’s low value payments capability across the regions it operates in. Over time this will let us integrate Australian payments onto the New Zealand Low Value Payments Engine platform to deliver multi-country, multi currency and routing capability,” says Sims.